Every two minutes someone turns to UK domestic abuse charity Refuge for support via one of its support platforms. On any given day its services support hundreds of women and children to help overcome the impacts of abuse and to rebuild their lives.
According to the deputy service manager at Refuge’s contact centre, Ellen Patterson, the charity’s network of employees and volunteers delivers 147 support sessions every day.
“Around 70% of the people we speak to are survivors of domestic abuse,” Patterson explains, “and 10% are from third parties – friends and neighbours etc and another 10% are from professionals from a variety of sectors who are usually looking to make a referral. Around 139 referrals are made to Refuge each week.”
In 2019 the UK government’s Home Office awarded Refuge the contract to run the 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline as its sole provider – a role it had previously jointly run with allied charity Women’s Aid.
As well as the initial four-year £1.2m contract, Refuge secured additional funding to develop new digital and mobile resources to support survivors. This led to the introduction of a live chat service in 2020 and an improved email support service, which now sees the team make 430 supportive emails per month.
During this period, Refuge also introduced a dedicated referral line, so that women can enquire specifically about refuge vacancies, as well as a BSL interpreter line.
According to Patterson, while the extra platforms were a welcome addition, it did lead to a bolt-on approach in terms of networking infrastructure. Legacy systems included a disparate collection of separate applications which provided telephony, chat and reporting, including Horizon Collaborate and ResourceConnect.
“Just because of the capacity within our team and the funds that we had available, all of these things had been kind of tacked on as we’ve gone along,” she recalls.
“We got to a situation where all these platforms became quite difficult to manage, it was taking time to navigate each platform for each different part of our service – both from a management perspective but also for the helpline advisers,” she adds.
The time taken to manage the navigation of this set-up, remembering the different logins for different platforms etc, was also taking away from time supporting survivors and it prompted the charity to consider a contact centre solution capable of “bringing everything into one place.”
Another reason to switch to a cloud-based comms system was the need to cater for remote workers: during and after the pandemic Refuge staff and volunteers had transitioned from a central contact centre in London, to working remotely or hybrid, from anywhere in the country.
“We largely work remotely now, and it’s good to be able to draw from a wider pool of experienced people – but managing this can be challenging,” says Patterson.
“Workers need a dedicated space where no one else can hear, no one can come into the room, it’s confidential. The technology needs to be reliable in terms of sound deadening and ensure that the line is clear – it’s important that someone on the other end of the phone who is in a really difficult situation trusts that this line is secure and can hear you properly.”
Another requirement was to be able to keep the continuity of the number: 0808 2000 247, as Patterson explains. “Even when the contract changed, and Women’s Aid ceased to be involved the number has stayed the same. Some people commit it to memory so it was important that it couldn’t change.”
Refuge selected Genesys Cloud CX platform, powered by AWS Cloud, which offers a full range of contact centre capabilities for remote and on-prem workers from a single platform.
Explaining why Genesys won the contract over other providers at the CX orchestration vendor’s London customer event Xperience last month, Patterson explained that, at first, they thought that the technology was beyond their budget.
“It was clear that we had champagne tastes on a beer budget! Fortunately for us (and for the survivors we support) Genesys made it possible for us to close that gap.”
She added that the fact Genesys made the effort to speak their language was also important. “It may not seem that significant but the difference between referring to our service users as ‘customers’, or even ‘victims’, instead of the survivors we know them to be was very important to us.”
Refuge’s internal team worked closely with the Genesys professional services team to implement the helpline on the platform, which the charity reports has been “highly configurable”, with “a minimum of software development needed.”
Patterson adds that staff training took place over a couple of weeks, with no real issues in terms of user take-up. “Our team are incredible and do a difficult job, some of them for over 20 years. So, while it is easy to get ingrained in the process that we had and there was some anxiety around learning to use a new system, as soon as they start using it, they found it intuitive and not scary at all.”
According to Patterson, there are several advantages to moving to a cloud-based contact centre system including the additional visibility of being able to see instantly how many callers are waiting and where they are calling in from.
“If a call drops while we’re speaking to a survivor, for whatever reason, we want to make sure that we can get the number back to call them (unless they’ve withheld their number) and that’s easier now we can see the customer journey.”
Managing the flow of calls and the type of calls better also has benefits for helpline staff and their managers too, says Patterson.
“We’re now able to create different pots of callers because the new system gives us more visibility as to who is calling and from where and how long they’ve been waiting.”
She adds that if a support service worker is on their last ten minutes it might not be the right time to take a call from a survivor calling in for the first time; but it may be long enough to take a call from a professional looking to make a referral.
“We can also now see if a member of staff has been on three days of taking phones every single day – which can be exhausting – as a manager I can now make that decision to give them a break by moving them onto one of our written platforms,” she adds.
The system is also better able to deal with language barriers. The previous system did not allow Refuge to take three-way calls, and non-English-speaking survivors were referred to an interpreter service. “We would have to give them the survivors’ number – but that function now sits with us. And we hold all the data ourselves,” Patterson explains.
The system has been live now for just over a month and Patterson says that it is on track to increase the number of interactions it has with service users by as much as 30 to 40%. “That’s 300 or 400 more survivors a week being supported as a result,” she adds.
Now Patteson says that the Refuge team is firmly focussed on consolidating its implementation although it is looking at a range of future AI-enabled possibilities, that it hopes to embrace eventually.
In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline – another Genesys Cloud user – is using selective, survivor-centric AI support to keep pace with a threefold increase in daily calls, chats and text.
Survivors phoning in have the option of providing a voice bot with non-identifiable demographic data and the outcomes they want to get out of the conversation, taking care to use their words and language. That information is then presented on screen when the call is routed to help prepare the support worker.
For Patterson, these sorts of applications are a little further down Refuge’s roadmap “We’re a little bit nervous about using AI – the inherent biases of those who write the data, build on that and learn. But when we first started talking to Genesys and the things it has on the roadmap for the future – then to not consider AI would be a disservice to our users
“It’s a big thing to pick up the phone, for instance, and speak to someone about something so personal and it may be that AI can help them get a little bit of info first to understand what their options and avenues are before they feel ready to speak to a person. We never want AI to replace that human interaction, but I can see a place for it.”
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